On April 21 2015 Google put in effect a large update that could potentially affect millions of businesses.

The new algorithm will start favoring mobile-friendly websites, ones with large text, easy-to-click links, or that resize to fit whatever screen they’re viewed on — and ranking them higher in search. Websites that aren’t mobile-friendly will get left behind in the dust.

The latest market statistics indicate that more than 45% of Fortune 500 companies and 29% of Internet Retailer 500 sites weren’t mobile friendly by early April, only weeks ahead of the update.

Will Mobilegeddon impact desktop search?

This Mobilegeddon update will not affect desktop search directly at least for now.

But indirectly it will also affect the desktop rankings, ranking factors like popularity, click through, links and social shares will in most cases grow much faster for sites that are also present and ranked highly in the Google mobile search.

What is Google now looking for when they test for Mobile Friendliness?

• Viewport Not Configured: A viewport meta tag tells browsers how to display a page different screen sizes.
• Content Not Sized to Viewport: When content isn’t sized to a mobile viewport, it requires mobile visitors to scroll horizontally.
• Touch Elements Too Close:This means buttons or other elements on the site are too close together for mobile visitors to use without touching other elements.
• Small Font Size: Small font size implies that content is too small to read without mobile users zooming in and resizing the page.
• Flash usage: Most mobile browsers don’t render Flash content.
• Resources blocked by robots.txt.

You can test your own websites Mobile Friendliness at Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test Site

How does Google’s “Mobilegeddon” update work in practicality?

• Page by page: The algorithm evaluates mobile-friendliness on a page by page basis.
• In real time: Google will assess and update mobile-friendliness at the same pace that it crawls and indexes your site.
• On a pass/fail system: A page is either considered mobile-friendly or not.

How can i make my website mobile friendly?

There are basically 3 different ways to approach mobile friendly design:

• Separate mobile URLs: Using a separate site for mobile and desktop visitors.
• Dynamic serving: Using different content for mobile and desktop visitors served from the same URLs.
• Responsive design: Using the same content from the same URLs but displaying it differently based on the browser size

Google has stated that their preference is for Responsive design, but all 3 methods are valid alternatives with their own pros and cons and which one fits best for your website will depend on many different factors.